Awesome / Alex Verus

• Luna gets one at the end of the first book when she manages to temporary alter her curse to help Alex overcome the Fateweaver.
• And then she gets another when in Chosen, when she saves Alex's life (after his own extensive but ultimately failed effort at defending himself), and she knows it, too:
  Luna: So now do I get to be the master and you have to do what I say?
• In Cursed, it is of note that Arachne is friends with a dragon... the size of a mountain range.
• In the same book, Alex defeats the Villain of the Week by using the gate stone said dragon gave him to gate himself and the villain in front of the dragon, who then punches said villain flat with a fist the size of a skyscraper in a beautiful inversion of Summon Bigger Fish.
• Luna in Taken. The first time she's forced into a duel she loses horribly, going 3-0 in three bouts in a row. Halfway through the book she gets an actual weapon to use in such duels and the girl who tore her down before, an elemental mage who should by all rights be leagues above Luna, gets laid out in front of most apprentices in the British isles.
• Also in Taken, right after this duel Luna is badly wounded and not caring about her curse, Anne jumps in to heal her. Alex can tell that Luna's curse actually struck and Anne gets a bit dizzy so we have to assume that Anne either suffered a heart attack or an aneurysm and she managed to shrug it off within seconds.
• At the climax of Taken, Alex has a duel with Onyx. No tricks, no evasions, just Alex with a stick against one of the scarier characters in the series. Between Alex' divination and Onyx' arrogance, Alex manages to hold him off long enough to escape. Given how he spent this book and the last two running from every confrontation with the man, that alone is quite the feat.
• While also slightly horrifying, Anne's duel with Crystal in Hidden qualifies. We finally get to see why she's such a scary duelist. It's not that she's skilled or deliberate, she just takes off at a dead run, grabs hold of whoever's on the other side of the arena and life-drains them. Doesn't matter how much damage they do to her, they need to blast her away to stop her.
• Alex is generally looked down on for being a diviner. In Hidden, he fights a Life mage. He wins with much guile. Later, that same Life mage stands in his way. Her reaction to realizing whom she is meant to stop?
  Life mage: Nope. Not doing this again. *runs away*
• During the climax of Veiled we finally get to see exactly what Alex means when he says that elemental mages outclass him because there's about a dozen battle mages assaulting a stronghold, one of them Variam's new Master Landis. And yet, Alex still manages to sway the tide of the battle via quick thinking.
• Burned gives us a showdown between Landis and Vihaela, two of the most lethal characters we've seen so far. We don't get to see very much of it, but given what happened in Veiled, him surviving the encounter and not requiring immediate medical attention is an impressive feat on its own.
• Early on in Bound, Anne fends off Vihaela. They have a short confrontation and by the end, Anne stands her ground and Vihaela is driven back. Given that two books ago we've seen Vihaela beat three combat mages without even trying, that says a lot about how powerful Anne really is.
• Just a small thing, but there is a lot of discussion on whether Luna even qualifies to be a mage or whether she's just a really unusual adept. But in Bound we learn that Luna can use gate stones, which an adept shouldn't have the magical horsepower to activate. In fact, even full-fledged Universal mages like Alex have trouble activating gate stones, so Luna being able to use them puts a full stop at the end of that discussion.
• During the climax of Bound we finally get to see Richard Drakh in action. He takes on an entire Crusaders black ops team on with Alex as his only backup and he beats them without breaking a sweat. The really impressive part about this is that he barely even uses magic to do it. He just uses a handgun, some Improbable Aiming Skills and some of the same focus items Alex habitually employs, like force walls and dispel focuses, to beat most of them. While he does use offensive and defensive magic, Alex notes that they're only barely strong enough to get the job done.
  Richard: Let me make myself quite clear. I will be departing this facility with Mage Verus and Miss Walker. Your choice is whether you will be alive or dead at the time.
  Crusader: Really. You're going to single-handedly kill every one of us.
  Richard: Not all of you. Somewhere between seven and ten of you. I expect Verus will account for the remainder.
• At the start of Marked, Alex's Combat Clairvoyance lets him pull off a Matrix-esque bullet-dodging sequence that had experienced Keepers in awe.
  Twelve bullets in the gun, ten steps to the woman. The first two shots went wild, and then her eyes focused on me and she aimed for my chest. I sidestepped to make the next two miss, then reversed direction, letting the next three go past on the other side. Only five steps left, but the closer I came, the harder it was to dodge. The eighth shot breezed by my head, but the ninth would have taken me in the stomach and I had to spin; that threw my balance off and I had to halt my advance and dodge the other way to avoid the next two. I twisted sideways, jerked my head out of the way as another bullet barely missed my neck, then I was square-on and the pistol was pointing right at my chest. The woman’s eyes never changed as she pulled the trigger. The gun clicked as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
• Midway through Marked, Alex and a group of Keepers try to arrest Richard, who brought with him a tall woman wreathed in darkness whose magic combines black and green energy. Everyone assumes it's Vihaela powered up with some imbued item from the Vault. As it turns out, that person was Not-Anne drawing on the Jinn's power. The awesome part about this is that Anne and the Jinn together are therefore a lot more powerful than one of the most lethal characters in the series.
  • That same scene has Alex assuming tactical command of the biggest combat operation the Council has had to run in decades and has him barking orders to a whole squad while casually leaning out of the way of enemy fire and managing to work out how to keep the civilians safe and stop the whole thing turning into a blood bath.
• In Fallen, Alex seriously ups his game:
  • He finally takes the fateweaver for himself, granting him a huge boost in power, which allows him to seriously threaten battle mages.
  • He decisively defeats Abithriax in a Battle At The Center Of The Mind. Even with the Dreamstone moving the confrontation to the elseworld, it is made clear that it is no small feat, as Abithriax is leagues beyond even skilled mind mages like Crystal.
  • He defeats and kills Onyx, one of the most powerful battle mage in the series.
  • He comes up with a plan that not only lets him reach his objectives, but also severely limits the potential danger for his friends.
  • Using his newfound powers, he casually manages to evade the Light Council hunting him, even though he has become a top priority target shortly below Drakh and Morden.
  • And the crowner: Alex finally gets an unambiguous and complete victory against Richard. Luna takes the time to point out that he managed to do what the entire Light Council (for all their resources and power) has been unable to do in several years. It is such a serious blow to Drakh that he loses his self-control in public for the very first time.
• It's a small moment in Forged, but it's no less amazing for that: Symmaris, the space mage who was instrumental in burning down Alex' shop in Burned, tries once again to gate a bunch of Keepers in to arrest Alex. Alex calmly and casually positions himself in such a way that he can fire a bullet right between Symmaris' eyes the moment she opens her gate. Even better, he does all this while casually keeping up a conversation.
• Forged finally gives us the assault on Levistus' stronghold.
  • Things kick off with Alex trapping an entire Keeper task force in a Deep Shadow Realm so they can't come to help for at least five hours.
  • Then Alex, with Anne (and her jann) as his only backup, takes on a whole squad of Council security, a group of Adept mercenaries, three mages, among them Caldera and Barrayar, and a pair of Mantis Golems.
  • Alex himself kills the entire security force, destroys a Mantis Golem on his own, makes the mercenaries run away and beats Caldera so badly that Anne needs to give her first aid to keep her from dying.
  • Then Alex follows Levistus into an allegedly impenetrable Shadow Realm and confronts him one on one. Well, after beating his new enslaved Air elemental. Levistus then reveals that in addition to his ice magic he can also use mind magic, which Alex casually shrugs off before slowly advancing through Levistus' onslaught and ramming his dagger first into Levistus' stomach and then his heart, finally killing the man who has been his greatest enemy since book one.
• Near the end of Forged, Morden tracks down Alex after his 'negotiations' with the LC (keep in mind that Alex was sparing no effort to hide as he was at this point one of, if not the highest priority target of the Council). He then informs Alex of his decision to get out of this whole mess and enjoy a safe retirement abroad. When Alex points out that the Light Council is unlikely to go along with it, Morden casually answers that his actions throughout the books, along with some interactions he had himself with the light side, have been enough to trick them into believing they were working together. Since Alex just strong-armed the Council into letting him and ''his immediate associates'' alone, he unwittingly handed Morden a get-out-of-jail-free card. Of course, Morden also gave them the impression that he had access to Levistius' blackmail material for good measure. Alex, being Alex, is able to piece it all together. But to his dismay, he realises that he cannot do anything about it without taking significant risks, and that even in the best case scenario, the actual benefits to him would be practically non-existent. Even though Verus weakly tries to provoke him by accusing him of running, Morden takes it in stride and unashamedly explains that knowing when to run is the difference between living a long life and ending up like Levistius or Jagadev. In other words, one of the big bad of the series is making an elegant exit without getting any kind of comeuppance, and our hero, far from being able to prevent it, was instead used as a key pawn to make it happen.
• Risen has the final battle against Marid!Anne's forces and it gives us a lot of great moments.
  • We begin with Alex realizing that Nimbus is screwing up the whole operation and arranging the fates so that one of Vihaela's guerrilla attacks hits and kills Nimbus so he can take command without having to personally attack a Keeper
  • Alex then takes control of the entire Keeper force and uses his divination and the Fateweaver to direct them against Richard's forces, fighting off his adepts and mages, ultimately outsmarting and killing Vihaela, the strongest battle mage in the British Isles
  • Next he tries talking the adepts into a ceasefire and manages to do so despite Richard carefully goading them beforehand
  • When Alex and Luna are face-to-face with the Monkey's Paw wearing Variam as a flesh puppet, not Alex but Luna manages to talk the Monkey's Paw into giving up Variam's body and standing aside
  • When Alex is face to face with Anne, he tricks her into Elsewhere where he finds both halves of her bickering and fighting and gives them a "The Reason You Suck" Speech so they work together to banish the Jinn once and for all
  • Once that's done Alex finally forces both sides of Anne to merge by breaking the prison tower Anne had built up in Elsewhere
  • And finally, Alex' fight with Richard. So far we've seen Richard fight precisely once, during the climax of Bound. Alex knew what to expect. He'd had years to prepare for it. Everyone knew it was going to happen. And finally, it does, in a collapsing shadow realm, at the very end.
    • We kick things off with Alex using his newfound power of obtasia to flood the futures with white noise to shut off divination for the both of them.
    • The two of them go toe to toe for a while until Richard thinks he's caught Alex out and fires a full magazine of his handgun into Alex. Except Alex reveals that he'd been wearing a bullet ward just in case Richard tried exactly that.
    • Richard makes full use of his jinn magic shield and his jinn attack spells, but Alex' sovnya is more than capable of carving through Richard's shield and the Fateweaver lets him ground out the attack spells
    • Partway through the Fateweaver spreads through Alex' lungs and he has to keep feeding the Fateweaver enough power to keep his lung working while simultaneously using it to keep Richard in check, keeping up his obtasia and actually fighting his opponent
    • And finally, Alex wins the fight by using the enchantment Arachne wove into Anne's dress to heal her and get her to wake up and help him, distracting Richard with a gunshot long enough for Anne to kill him even as his heart is giving out
  • And then, in the Epilogue, we learn that Anne managed to save Alex' life by pushing the Fateweaver to fully merge with his body and both of them are living Happily Ever After in the Hollow.